Lineage

Inspiration

Family history and culture dies with each generation. Language barriers, geographic distance, and current preservation methods leave elders’ stories — including their struggles, wisdom, and lived experiences — permanently forgotten.

Traditional preservation methods fall short. Written memoirs require significant time, effort and literary skill. Photo albums sit untouched in closets. Artifacts cannot encapsulate a lifetime. Even the deep, emotional conversations are almost never recorded.

As children/grandchildren of immigrants, this problem especially resonates with us, which compelled us to solve this problem.

What it does

Lineage creates an engaging video telling the story of a family member’s life, connecting generations and keeping history alive.

Here's how it works:

Structure Your Movie: Answer some initial questions to generate your movie's "chapters".
Write Your Script: Talk with Lineage like a friend, and our Speech-To-Script technology will write your movie script.
Curate Your Photos: Choose your favorite snapshots from your life, and Lineage will fill in the gaps in your movie.
Choose Your Narrator: Voice the script yourself or choose an AI persona to narrate your movie.
Enjoy Your Movie: Watch a video capturing your life's story with your loved ones, ensuring your story is forever remembered.

How we built it

Lineage is a web application primarily built with Next.js (TypeScript) and FastAPI (Python). We built a series of multi-agent pipelines to generate a full video given a movie script and a collection of photos. Our AI technology semantically matches the uploaded photos with the script and includes extra fetched photos that naturally fill the movie's gaps. It also naturally talks with the user about their life and uses that as an input to generate a compelling movie script.

Challenges we ran into

Connecting ElevenLabs for real-time AI conversations
Open source LLM integration

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building complex multi-agent pipelines in a short period of time
Building a full-stack web application with persistent DB storage, auth, and deploy-ready